The Past (11 page)

THE SEEDS OF those eucalypti were brought from Tasmania by what Victorian adventurer? A hill, weeping in a blue haze, the huge trees
dipping from it, divesting themselves of bark in long fleshy stripes. The bark falling to earth at the trees' roots, steaming, each stripe like leather, malleable, even useful. And the temperament that could transplant such seeds, over continents and dips and crests of climate, to root them by this bay where the rain falls in sheets and squalls, never in vertical lines. Their odour of resin and tomcats, plucked from that torrid world to fill this grey one. I walk along the hill and chew the eucalyptus. It cleans the gums, cures colds and freshens the nasal passage. I could dive into that Italianate bay, the erotic stripes of the trees above me.

IT WAS THE old man's temperament, impatient with geography, seasons, seas, impatient with everything. His rugged Bohemianism and bad taste. His tweed trousers and laced boots that were like his son's but that scarred any number of parquet floors. His voice, that never lost the haughty gruffness bequeathed him by generations of dealing in delft.

‘I LIKE ECCENTRICS, anyway, and Protestant eccentrics most of all. I went with her now and then, when she visited the house. “How's my fashion-cover girl?” he'd greet her in that room covered in tobacco smoke and the stench of his illness. She always bore it better than I. He had a photo of her knees in silk stockings, taken from an ad in the
Freeman's Journal.
He'd pull it out and ask to compare it with
reality. She'd lift her dress and show him. He claimed he'd never seen knees so perfect, given all his years with artists' models. And knees, he claimed were the pivot of the female form. There were rumours once—this was years before Rene—of a naked girl with her back to that bay window downstairs that faced on to the street. Of him bringing the habits he'd learnt in Paris home to Bray. Rumour flew the way it flies and grew in colour as it flew and it reached the parish priest as a story of a girl from the cottages on the west side disrobing each afternoon for filthy lucre. And so the priest knocked on every door in that labyrinth of artisan dwellings, interviewed each girl only to hear each girl deny it, protesting her modesty. But what else would they do, the priest thinks, these that keep coal in their baths, but deny it? So he upped and went to Sydenham Villas. And picture it, if you can, a hot day in May maybe, he in a black overcoat, his stocky black hand knocking at the door of Number One, the old man answering, the priest humming and hawing, muttering eventually vague threats about Catholic girlhood. And so at last it dawned on old Vance and the story goes that he grabbed the priest like an errant schoolboy, dragged him into the inside room and showed him, on a satin pouf, in a room misty with tobacco smoke, a naked, dark-haired and utterly bored young woman. “There's your Adam's Rib,” he shouted and propelled him back to the door. “She's not under your jurisdiction,” he fulminated, loud, so the whole street could hear. “She's Jewish.” '

THEY COME DOWN from Dublin for three months of every summer, from the days when the railway was first built, taking villas by the
bowling green, the young Jewish daughters walking on the prom, plump and olive-skinned. That's before the droves of Scots and their cheap weekends. But then the story of houses and towns is decay. From the heyday of the Jewish girls and the first Great Southern line. Would the priest have transgressed years before, would he have dared call on Vance without an invitation, without coach and four to take him up the long drive with its views to the left of the Meath estate?

‘STILL, THE OLD man knew who he was. He didn't have to learn Irish, stagger into rooms with a look of pain in his face, photograph every Mick and Pat with snot on his nose and mud on his boots. You could talk to him, you could love him and not despite his being an ascendancy boor but because of it. And that's the tragedy, isn't it? James, with all his reservations, got the worst of both worlds. Brooding, you see, is always unlucky. The old man never brooded. James did—'

IT BEGINS TO rain. The water falls in separate threads at first and then comes faster, closer, with no wind to impede its falling. A tropical downpour. James leans against a eucalyptus, which is useless since the leaves of that genus are tiny and form a laughable contrast to the smooth sweep of its bark. He is soon wet through, with the rain streaming from the trunks and the drops hopping from the ground and turning to spray and the spray turning to mist. The air becomes fetid,
the odour more resinous, as if the moisture is clinging to it and it to the moisture. He stares across the bay and sees the sheen of the water, for once without trace of current or wind, transformed by rain into an even sheet of hammered tin. The tart taste of bark is in his mouth and his gums are hot and alive. The water pouring down the skin of the trees is unable to dim the cream-coloured stripes where the bark has peeled, and he sees those stripes as unlikely murals, scoured by some careless finger. He feels there is a life sleeping in him, being awakened now by this odour of tropica. It is as if the rain has recreated the home of this bark. There is a hill, weeping in a blue haze, the huge trees dipping from it, losing their coats in long fleshy stripes. His tastes are mathematics and photography, his sympathies Republican, his background Protestant. He has entered a Catholic marriage and his wife has not long ago died, having left him a son christened Luke. He has a self that has always merely watched, merely waited and observed and that seems about to rear now like a tapeworm, pulled by this moisture through his opened lips. He stares at that hammered sea as if waiting for a face to emerge from that multitudinous pressure of drops, quietly, unheralded, each detail sculpted aeons ago, before rain and sea started, like those faces that form themselves on his metal plates.

Would he ever see that face? The meaning we demand from the span and the whole but in particular the surface frieze of the sensual world is never forthcoming; or if it is, not in any form that comforts. If it comes it comes too late, if it speaks, it is always in retrospect and the message he wants from the grey sheet of sea and the tepid air comes only when both have been dulled by memory and by time and when quite another message is demanded. And by then, besides, the rain has stopped, the sea is quite achingly blue, it washes another
shore maybe, another bay and the only fresh piece he retains is the one he in fact never saw, that edged into his picture from nowhere; that face, perhaps, or that imagined hill with its outlandish climate, its quite imaginary eucalypti. And yet it still clung to him, a dogged belief in surfaces. He would have even then liked to photograph that scene, to capture that precise balance of elements, why the rain was thus on the sea, why the trees made it mist and channelled the water in sheets and perhaps it was precisely for that reason—that tomorrow the sea might be blue and the air contain nothing but the odour of dust and sunlight. And it could all be held then and pasted in his black book on his green felt table and seen as evidence of, if nothing else, the impossibility of answers. How it was, each print would say, on
this
day, the sun hit Luke's face in such and such a manner, and he was seven then, and longer than his years. This is Benburb Street, another would say, in the great days of hand-painted signs. And so the prints accumulate, each one a document of how, of a present that becomes past as soon as it's developed and only through the future gradually reveals its secrets; the accumulation of them across the years becoming a question mark, a dogged, nagging why? And perhaps he suspected as he gathered them with that fatalism common to collectors that each one was the attempted formulation of an ultimate question and that all answers are retrospective, and so it took months and years of prints for him to even know what he was asking; that he could never hope for arrival, at the most for a judicious departure. And besides, he had a passive nature, he suppressed the general, paid obsessive attention to detail; the kind of passive nature that, when the rain stops falling round the eucalypti and the blue is out at last, walks from the thin shelter they afforded and stops thinking of them too.